Coalition of Action on Sustainable Productivity Growth for Food Security and Resource Conservation

Agriculture faces the daunting challenge of producing more food to meet the nutrition needs of a growing world population while at the same time dealing with climate change and ever-tightening natural resource constraints. This challenge is made even more complex by the fact that unless safe and nutritious food is affordable and reliably accessible, food insecurity and malnutrition will persist. In addition, unless farmers and farm workers make decent incomes, poverty will grow, and farming will fail.

Increasing agricultural productivity growth is one of the only ways to solve this multi-objective optimization problem. However, delivering on the potential of agricultural productivity growth requires a holistic, systems approach to resource conservation and efficiency. Siloed efforts to increase agricultural productivity often focus on single objectives and can have unintended consequences on other objectives. A coalition of action focused on sustainable productivity growth will help break silos and deliver on agricultural productivity growth’s potential to accelerate progress across multiple objectives.

The Coalition for Sustainable Productivity Growth for Food Security and Resource Conservation (the SPG Coalition) will accelerate the transition to more sustainable food systems through agricultural productivity growth that optimizes agricultural sustainability across social, economic, and environmental dimensions. The SPG Coalition will advance a holistic approach to productivity growth that considers impacts and tradeoffs among multiple objectives.

This effort will directly advance SDGs 2.3 and 2.4, both of which call for increasing agricultural productivity. It has impacts on SDGs 1, 2, 8, 13, 15 and 16.